Nick Eubank

Nick Eubank is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Nick‘s research focuses on the relationship between democratic social capital and the effectiveness of civil society in holding politicians to account. Overcoming a key empirical shortcoming of the research on social capital, he measures social capital in terms of observable social network structures. Social networks are thought to shape the ability of citizens to interact, organize and share information – activities that are critical for effective policing of government activity. Yet due primarily to a lack of data in developing countries, we have very little empirical evidence on this topic. Nick uses six months of detailed and geocoded telecommunications data from a cell phone provider in Zambia to test the relationship between social network properties and the capacity of citizens to engage in social sanctioning, collective action, and informal information sharing.